Body Bags

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT BODY BAGS - PAGE 4

In one scene, gang members gently shepherd a cluster of perhaps 20 customers across a Chicago street. Drug peddlers await them, wares at the ready. No leisurely shopping allowed. Cops are on the prowl, so the dope will be exposed for only seconds. You buy, you're gone. Another scene shows a drug giveaway at Washington Boulevard and Keeler Avenue. Businesses can't expand without new customers. How better to hook them than with free samples? A third scene shows junkies and hookers hired to work as lookouts.

Feb 28 (Reuters) - A funeral director in Mississippi got a bit of a shock this week when a man, brought to him in a body bag, kicked to get out just before he was to be embalmed, a local TV station reported. "He was not dead, long story short," funeral director Byron Porter told broadcaster WAPT late on Thursday. The man, Walter Williams, had been pronounced dead on Wednesday after the coroner arrived at his home in Lexington and found no pulse. Williams was then taken to the funeral home.

Air bags save lives. So says the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in a newly released report on the effectiveness of side-impact air bags, which deploy out of the door or seat to protect the chest and head or abdomen, and side-curtain air bags, which deploy out of the roof along the windows to protect the head. The institute, funded by the major insurers, found that the risk of death for drivers in a T-bone crash with another car is reduced by 57 percent from bags that protect the head, 29 percent from those that protect the chest and abdomen.

A surveillance video catches the chilling scene of a shoplifter gunning down a mall security guard, and for several days local television shows the scene at noon, 5, 5:30, 6 and 10. At an inner-city cemetery, vandals break open a casket and behead a corpse. TV news beams video of the scene into thousands of homes. A father is led away in handcuffs for killing his little girl, and a camera crew records the wails of a distraught relative. Such images are mainstays of television news across the country, squeezing out stories about government, race relations and education, according to a national study released last week.

When you sign up with the military, you figure at some point someone might try to shoot you. When you become a police officer, likewise. Deadly risk comes with the job. But teaching English to teenagers? Nobody ever became a teacher figuring some day they might have to take a bullet for their efforts. That's all changed. Teacher terror is the newest plague; book bags or body bags is the coin toss of our times. I've heard from several frightened teachers in recent weeks following various school shootings that have claimed more than a dozen lives in the past year.

Save yourself a world of hurt. Back and shoulder hurt, I mean. Get yourself a cross-body bag. These smallish purses that you drape - where else? - across your body have a lot going for them. For one thing, they're generally cheaper than their full-size counterparts. Love that! (With the exception of the gray-and-yellow Coach bag, those on this page are all $60 or less. Well less.) In a crowd, you'll like the cross-body because it's more secure than clutches, hand or shoulder bags, all of which are more susceptible to the grab-and-go purse snatcher.

Ask French officials whether they are tempted to play "I told you so" with the Bush administration over the war in Iraq and you get a dismissive wave, a brief lecture in geopolitics and an impassioned defense of the Franco-American alliance. Just like the United States, France wants Iraq to be peaceful, prosperous and democratic, officials say. They merely remain convinced that the Bush administration is going about it the wrong way. "There is no desire from us to stick it to anybody," said Herve Ladsous, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman.

By John Chase and Jeff Coen and Tribune staff reporters | March 6, 1999

As police sifted through their evidence Friday and friends and neighbors sorted through their memories for clues to what had happened at the cranberry-red Victorian house in downtown Naperville, there was one horrid and indisputable fact: Three small children had been killed. One investigator working the case said it appeared that the Lemak children--Nicholas, 7; Emily, 6; and Thomas, 3--had ingested poison or drugs, perhaps at dinner time or later Thursday night. There was no evidence that they had been given injections.

Is it really necessary to include photographs of body bags when printing a story such as the crash on the Northwest Tollway? It would be far more respectful to those involved in these tragedies and their families to skip the grisly sensationalism.